The Great Railroad Revolution (55 page)

Before the decline of the railroads gathered pace in the 1930s, there was time for one new pair of railroad barons to emerge, even as the debate in the commission over consolidation continued. These were the Van Sweringen brothers, property developers from Cleveland, Ohio, who entered the railroad business accidentally when they built a suburb called Shaker Heights in their hometown and needed to provide a rail line to enable residents to reach downtown easily. Oris Paxton Van Sweringen and Mantis James Van Sweringen, or the Vans, as they became known, were undoubtedly the strangest of the railroad barons. Born two years apart, the reclusive bachelor brothers not only gave their very rare interviews together but also shared a bedroom in a vast mansion called Daisy Hill. They were a mix of extreme aggression and boldness in their business dealings, while in person they were modest and retiring. They were as inseparable in death as they were in life, dying, only in their fifties, within a year of each other— Mantis in December 1935 and Oris in November 1936. The Vans had bought their first railroad, the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad (known as the Nickel Plate Road) from the New York Central purely to provide a rapid-transit route from Shaker Heights to downtown Cleveland. The Nickel Plate Road was an interesting example of a “nuisance” railroad, a five-hundred-mile line built by speculators to take business away from the Central's profitable Lake Shore route between Buffalo and Chicago. Soon after its completion in 1882, it was bought at a good price by the Vanderbilts, as the investors had hoped, but following the outbreak of the First World War, it was sold to the Van Sweringens out of fear that retaining it would result in an antitrust prosecution. Although the Vans had originally been interested only in a small part of the railroad, the acquisition inspired them to build up a massive railroad empire that, at its height, before the 1929 Wall Street crash, had a paper value of $3 billion and stretched across
thirty thousand miles. Their holdings, controlled through a complex web of companies that made it uncertain as to precisely how much money they invested personally and how much consisted of what are now known as junk bonds, included the Erie Railroad, the largely coal-carrying Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, and the Pere Marquette Railway, which had a series of lines in the Great Lakes area of the Midwest. Since the commission was debating the future structure of the industry and therefore few railroads attempted any consolidation, the short-lived empire built up by the Vans was the only new major railroad company allowed by the ICC to be established during the 1920s. However, there were immediate doubts about its solvency, which were quickly confirmed once shares started plummeting during the crash. The Vans lost their fortune even more quickly than it had been built up, and they disappeared from public view, dying in apparent poverty.

There was a mixed reaction in the railroad industry to the danger posed by the automobile. The complacency of some executives was well summed up by a promoter of interurban railroads who was quoted as saying in 1916 that “the fad of automobile riding will gradually wear off and the time will soon be here when a very large part of the people will cease to think of automobile rides.”
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Others, though, seeing that their monopoly position was being challenged, sought to improve the service they offered passengers. This was particularly true on many longer-distance services, where there were marked improvements during the interwar period, but several companies with big commuting markets were also alert to the potential threat from the automobile. Although no major intercity lines were electrified in the 1920s, apart from some sections of the Pennsylvania, numerous sub-urban services were converted, but despite the obvious advantages, at times the catalyst of external pressure was needed for the change to be made. In Chicago, it was complaints from the city authorities over the nuisance caused by smoke from steam locomotives that made the Illinois Central electrify its services. In the East, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was forced to do so in order to speed up turnaround times in its Philadelphia station, which had limited capacity, while the Lackawanna followed suit partly for the same reason. Interestingly, although electrification greatly improved the passenger experience, since electric trains were cleaner and
faster than their steam equivalents, this was rarely uppermost in the minds of the railroad managers making the decision. Rather, it was reducing costs and improving efficiency that motivated them to make the change. There was still, among many railroad managers, the notion that passengers were more trouble than they were worth. James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern, characterized passenger services in bizarre terms, as “the equivalent of the male teat, neither useful nor ornamental.”
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Overall, while passengers at the time contributed around a quarter of total railroad revenue, the proportion varied widely from company to company, with the big railroads in the East being most dependent on fare income, while some midwestern railroads made little provision for troublesome humans. Hill's remark confirms the fact that, as mentioned before, generally for most railroads income from freight was higher than passenger revenue. This was true even in the 1920s, when passenger revenue was so high, and it goes a long way to explaining why the passenger business was allowed to wither away so quickly after the Second World War.

The hostility to passenger services, though by no means universal, was sufficiently prevalent to account for the general mood of complacency of the railroad companies about the rise of automobile travel. The year 1920 had seen the highest-ever number of passengers—1.2 billion, not including commuters—but by the end of the decade, total passenger mileage across all railroads had fallen by more than 40 percent, despite the population growing by one-eighth. At the time of the Wall Street crash of 1929, Americans were already traveling five times farther in their cars than by train. Although the railroads still had by far the biggest chunk of the business market and the prestige services continued to flourish, there was little attempt to speed up services overall: “The blue-ribbon extra-fare trains between the East Coast and Chicago revealed what passenger officials thought was most important: comfort, luxury and safety. Speed is the enemy of all of these, and it is the enemy of track maintenance as well [making it far more expensive].” Instead, the companies tended to focus on passenger care, trying to outdo each other in offering the most molly-coddling. Redcap porters would ensure that no passenger carried his or her baggage, and indeed on most major routes railroad travelers could avail themselves of a door-to-door service, neatly described by Martin: “The affluent
Midwestern family whose son was leaving shortly for Yale College phoned the railroad depot the day before and had the expressman call in his van for the lad's trunks and suitcases. Father handed the man the railroad ticket and he duly punched the square indicating that the traveler's baggage—150 pounds were allowed [on a full-price ticket]—had been checked to destination.”
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In fact, it was even better than this implies. The luggage was not simply taken to the station in New Haven, but rather driven to the student's room at the college, where it would await his arrival. This door-to-door service was routinely provided for business travelers, too, who would inform the clerk at the hotel to arrange for the baggage to be taken to their next destination.

For the affluent customers, the prestige trains continued to vie with each other to provide the best service. The interwar period was the heyday of these services. The huge distances required to travel across the United States and the lack of any realistic alternative mode of travel for most journeys meant that the rich flocked onto trains, and the railroads made sure to cater to their every need. Even before 1914, the example of the Pennsylvania and New York Central in creating luxury trains was being followed elsewhere. In 1911, the Santa Fe launched the De Luxe, running once a week between Chicago and Los Angeles, a trip that took sixty-one hours. It was limited to just sixty passengers, who paid a supplement of twenty-five dollars (the equivalent of around eight hundred dollars today). The Santa Fe clearly tried to outdo anything the New York Central provided on the Twentieth Century Limited. Not only was nearly all the train's accommodation in individual rooms, and the passengers' every requirement attended to by a vast array of staff, ranging from a manicurist and barber to a librarian, but every “male passenger was presented with a pigskin wallet embossed with the train's title in gilt; and at the California border uniformed pages would swarm aboard with corsages for each lady.”
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Many luxury trains sought to develop distinctive aspects of their service to attract publicity and passengers. On its long trip between Chicago and Seattle, the Great Northern's Oriental Limited featured a 5:00 p.m. ritual when a steward, bearing a silver tea service and followed by a retinue of uniformed maids carrying sandwiches and patisseries, would walk down the length of the train, handing out these treats. Gyms, string quartets, swimsuit modeling, and Sunday
services all featured on these trains. When it was relaunched in 1930, the North Coast Limited, which also ran between Chicago and Seattle but on the Northern Pacific's tracks, boasted an electrician solely required to look after the innovative art deco lightbulbs.

The major passenger flows were not, of course, just on the east-west axis. There were well-used long-distance passenger routes on both coasts. In the East, they stretched from the Northeast down to Florida, which was booming as a vacation destination, thanks partly to the railroad created by Henry Flagler. On the West Coast, the rapid expansion in the population of California, opened up by the transcontinentals, led to the creation of a range of successful services, especially in the key corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles but also stretching right up to Washington State. One key route, used not so much by the rich but crucial to the internal settlement pattern of the United States, was Chicago–New Orleans. The efficiency of the service meant that Chicago was often the first place that African Americans, fleeing the Jim Crow laws of the South, ended up, seeking jobs in the burgeoning industries of the Midwest such as the stockyards of Chicago or the automobile plants of Detroit. And they brought with them their music, creating the renowned Chicago jazz and blues culture.

In their heyday, the prestige trains were major moneymakers, and after the crash and the Depression, the rail companies realized that modernization was essential for survival. Aviation, though still in its infancy, had begun to tempt a few courageous, affluent, and, given the early safety record, foolhardy travelers to venture into the skies. Just as the government had helped the nascent railroads with contracts to transport mail, they supported early commercial airlines with similar arrangements. The first post office airmail service started operating between New York City and Washington, DC, as early as 1918, and soon transcontinental flights were creaming off the lucrative mail business from the railroads. In 1925, private contractors were allowed to carry mail, just as the early railroad companies had done, and these flights started taking a few passengers as a sideline. There was at least one attempt by the railroads to merge the two modes with the launch of a joint venture by Transcontinental Air Transport, with two railroads, the Santa Fe and the Pennsylvania. They offered passengers
a trip across America from coast to coast in forty-eight hours—cutting a day off the normal train service—traveling by rail at night, as nighttime flying was deemed too difficult, and by air during the day. By 1930, it became possible for the first time to fly all the way from coast to coast, but it was not until the advent of the DC-3—the Dakota—in 1936 that aircraft had sufficient capacity to allow the airlines to make a profit solely through carrying passengers rather than being covertly subsidized with a mail contract. Even with the introduction of the DC-3, aviation barely impinged on the railroads' long-distance market before the war, as in 1940 it still had barely 3 percent of the market.

Buses had begun to attract some passengers at the lower end of the market by the outbreak of the Second World War. The railroads, realizing the danger, began to operate numerous bus services themselves and acquired many of the small operators who proliferated in the 1920s. Greyhound buses started making transcontinental trips by 1927, and the national Grey hound network was created two years later. However, the road network was still poor, with large sections still unpaved, and the railroads remained competitive on key routes. For example, a journey between New York and Chicago by bus in the late 1920s took twice as long as the ride by rail and in far less comfortable conditions. Nevertheless, despite a downturn during the Depression, by the outbreak of the Second World War Greyhound Lines had become well established as a national carrier, serving nearly five thousand towns throughout the nation.

Trucks were already posing a more potent threat to freight traffic. The first trucks had appeared in 1904 but could not even begin to compete with the railroads until the technology was improved to make them more reliable and increase their payload. Moreover, cars and trucks initially posed no threat to the railroads simply because “there really was nowhere to drive them.”
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When a reckless doctor from Vermont, Nelson Jackson, accepted a bet to drive across the United States in 1903, it took him sixty-three days, as he spent much of the time repairing punctures and getting pulled out of potholes by helpful local farmers. The poor state of the roads was a direct result of the success of the railroads. Once it was clear, soon after the in-augural run of the Baltimore & Ohio, that the railroads were going to spread rapidly around the country, the turnpikes declined and there was no
appetite to build any new roads. Throughout the nineteenth century, the more that the railroads established their dominance—in some places such as Colorado, they even bought up the old turnpikes to use as lines of route—the less appetite there was for spending any money on road building or even maintenance. In particular, any notion of establishing a national road system, an aspiration of numerous early- nineteenth-century luminaries, was quietly shelved.